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Marion Gibson, Peter Elmer. Witchcraft, Witch-Hunting, and Politics in Early Modern England., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1684–1685, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1684
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Peter Elmer’s new book is a solidly researched, exciting, and extremely useful addition to the field of witchcraft studies. Its focus, as the title suggests, is on the politics of witch-hunting, by which Elmer means the ideological high politics of sect, party, and faction, rather than the personal politics of gender or social status. As Elmer points out, the political aspect of the crime’s definition was pioneered by such scholars as Christina Larner and Ian Bostridge, but it has been recurred to only intermittently since then. Elmer also acknowledges his debt to his mentor Stuart Clark, whom he regards as the defining figure in the field in the last half-century or so, the successor to Keith Thomas. As Elmer explains, his own work is framed by Clark’s insistence on examining the large ideological structures that shaped thinking and writing about, and acting on, witchcraft suspicions. Therefore, Elmer, too, in his survey has searched for patterns and shifts in ideology. That the search has taken him two decades is a measure of the book’s thoughtfulness and depth of detail.
